Drawlery

The chimney sweep stopped by the Lounge the other day for
his annual visit, to clear the flume of various things gone up in smoke over
the last year, and he was telling us about his recent visit to Smith Island - a
community in Chesapeake Bay somewhat renowned for its peculiar accent. One fellow he met there used
all sorts of unusual expressions that the sweep had never heard, but what
caught our attention - we're always on the lookout for this kind of thing - was
this peculiar, if not particularly sweeping statement: "You know, he had
that brogue."

At this, the Loungeurs exchanged a mutual arch look which to
us all signaled: this bears investigation. What was a resident of Smith
Island doing with a brogue, anyway? (Which to our minds, since we always think
etymologically, suggests an Irish accent). After the sweep had left, we poked
around on the Internet, whipped out the Visual Thesaurus, and gathered up our
corpora from the sideboard to see whether such a statement could possibly be
justified.

Smith Island, it turns out, was settled by English and Welsh
settlers, so a genuine brogue there seems unlikely; but we found this statement
on one website: "The roots on Smith Island are so deep that even the modes
of speech hearken to another era. Islanders have an accent-a slight English lilt
warmed by a Southern drawl."

Huh? This got us to wondering about the words people use -
in our opinion, quite vaguely and perhaps without a proper idea of their defined
meanings - to indicate that someone else's way of talking is different from
their own. Both of the foregoing words, lilt and drawl (as we'll
see) hook up in the Thesaurus with the more generic pronounce:
"utter in a certain way."

First to drawl.
The VT tells us that it is " a slow speech pattern with prolonged
vowels." Looking at various examples of drawl in context, we find it
collocates most often with regions. Americans put drawls all over the map: in
addition to the Southern one noted above, people have observed Midwestern,
Tidewater, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana drawls. In general, drawls seem to
be found charming: they are characterized as folksy, sexy, and even soothing
and butter-like, though occasionally a drawl goes the other way and is
characterized as acerbic or nasal. Britons, on the other hand, recognize drawls
in different places: theirs are Cockney, Harvard, London, West Midlands, and
Somerset drawls. One British novelist bridges the Atlantic divide by noting a
character who "spoke with a hint of Scottish accent through his Canadian
drawl."

Another word that people use to distance themselves from
someone else's speech is twang.
Twangs seem to be uniformly either rural or remote: Americans identify them as
western, Aussie, Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, or Southern. Brits, on the other
hand, note twangs that are cowboy, Texas, Irish, or Australian. There seems to
be at least a consensus that Aussies and Texans have a twang, despite the lack
of any noticeable similarities in their speech. Can you have a Texas drawl and
twang at the same time? Would this be a social handicap?

Like drawls, twangs can be nasal, but twangs are also
unusually often characterized as flat,
whereas drawls are not. Ever hear the flat twang of Iowa or of New Zealand?
Someone has. What sort of flat is this? In the dizzying word picture for this
adjective, we suspect that the inspiration for application to speech are
synonyms such as vapid, flavorless, savorless, and insipid on the
one hand, and lacking contrast or shading between tones on the other.
Conclusion: flatness is to be avoided if you want your drawl to be charming.

An almost entirely commendable quality in someone else's
voice (speakers rarely acknowledge one in their own) is the lilt, which we have already seen
attributed to the Smith Islanders. A cruise through corpora reveals interesting
things about lilts: they're seductive! They're soft and sexy! They're both
husky and feminine! Singer Melissa Etheridge is reputed by one writer to have a
trademark husky lilt. Americans don't seem to be inclined to regionalize the
lilt, but Brits banish it to the outliers: Geordie (by this they mean
Tyneside), Irish, Welsh, Bajan, Nigerian, Scots. (Bajan? It's in Barbados.)

If you're waiting for the meaningful pattern to emerge here,
it seems to be this: somebody with a lilt, drawl, twang, or brogue is someone
who talks noticeably differently than you do. A Houston Chronicle reporter
covers all of his bases in this observation (our emphasis added):

"Conversations on airplane flights to this once-sleepy
provincial capital [of Maturin, Venezuela] lilt with the twangs
and drawls of the U.S. oil patch."

The other justifiable observation is that with slight
tweaking via modifiers, all of these words (lilt, twang, drawl, brogue) are
also used to convey that someone else's pronunciation is rather charming, or
(in the case of "flat" and "nasal"), rather irritating.

So much for the good news. The ways to rubbish someone
else's way of speaking are relatively fewer, but unambiguous. One thing you
surely want to avoid is any accusation of sounding clipped. Presumably this is clipped
in the sense of "cut short," but it never says anything nice about
speech. You've got your clipped Oxford-style diction, your British upper-class
clipped tones. Tones, in fact, are a favorite collocate of clipped,
and the are often noted as cold, short, or deliberate. How about " the
clipped tones of one who was raised in the military"? Somehow you know
that if anyone ever said "I love you" in clipped tones, it would be
deliberately calculating rather than sincere and you couldn't bank on it. How
about this damning characterization in a British newspaper:

Those tight-lipped, clipped voices curl the toes of
anyone who lives north of Watford and can't say "five thisand pinds."

Finally, besides clipping, you'll want to avoid lisping, a
definite no-no in endearing speech for anyone over the age of five. Lisp has a technical definition and
is classified as a speech defect. Why is it then that we tend to use it
disparagingly? Examples from our corpora abound:

lisping, greasy obsequiousness

a lisping foreign accent

lisping, limp-wristed homosexuals

a stage-Jew/menacing/eerie lisp

Further reading:

To learn more about the Smith Islanders and their dialect,
you can visit: